#dressing different

[donkey176]

His and hers chainmail. Love the cute little chainmail collar!

Renaissance Faire here we come …

[motheroface]

My tiny fear...

is that my Ace still feels like they can’t be themselves around me. I caused that. I cried when I discovered the manufactured material meant to conceal the sex of my child. My Ace has reached adult years and I, logically, have no say over whether Ace steps into life with the predisposed sexual identity or disfigures it.

I haven’t put up a fight. I feel sadness, though. I feel like I’m losing someone I dearly love to something I’m not certain is a condition of life. I have no way to grasp this. It’s not cancer - by which I mean it doesn’t wreck the senses as if some kind of brutal change out of anyone’s control happened to my Ace.

I’m losing someone I dearly love but who dearly doesn’t love themselves - not as they are. They love themselves as they could be; can turn into being. Physical structure may be a trivial nuisance to non-gender specific people. To the gender-specific it can be a nuisance also, but helpful too. Helpful in recognizing. Helpful in identifying. Helpful in familiarity. Tangibility. Humanity.

And I suppose that’s the feeling, isn’t it? That I’m losing my little human to something bigger and broader and less definable than Ace is, or has been, to me all their life.

You might console me and say they’ll still be my darling. I am still going to cry for my loss. And I’m going to cry for Ace’s gain, too. Because what mom can want her child to be uncomfortable in their own body?

I realize that concealing one’s sexual identity isn’t a prime characteristic of an “ACE.”  I can see how doing so can sort of buffer against advances from boys and girls. I can see how doing so can sort of thin the friends list to the bare bone essentials and give Ace a sense of security while moving onward, growing older, in the presence of people who are damned infatuated with sex and romance. Those people, for the most part, won’t bother to look. The curious ones maybe. The loyal ones might.

Here comes cotton to the rescue?

What does this teach Ace about dealing with life as we all know it?

Is this a clever escape or a lazy one?

My tiny fear is that my Ace still feels they can’t be themselves around me. And how could they if, when they try, I cry?